Newest Study Guides

Sweetness in the Belly is a novel written by Camilla Gibb. It was published in 2005 and was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Camilla Gibb lives in Canada and has written a few books that have been well received internationally. She has a...

Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, by Tom Perrotta, is a collection of short stories about a young boy named Buddy who has unsettling memories of New Jersey during the 1970s. This book explores classic 70s themes relating to parents, sports,...

The Couple Next Door is a 2016 thriller novel by Shari Lapena, a former lawyer and English teacher turned acclaimed writer. Fast-paced and gripping, it involves a strange abduction, characters hiding dark secrets, and a riveting twist that make...

The Reader is a novel that was originally written in German in 1995 by author and law professor Bernard Schlink. In 1996 it was translated into English and published worldwide, becoming an instant best-seller. The novel was controversial as it...

Osip Emil’evich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw when it was still part of the Russian empire in 1891. Efforts to escape rampant anti-Semitism eventually moved Mandelstam to St. Petersburg and living in the heart of the Russian empire eventually him...

Trouble is a novel written by Gary Schmidt and published in 2008. It is geared towards young adults, with the themes reaching much deeper than bullying and trouble of that sort. The moral lessons that the novel teaches are much more far reaching...

Dead Man is Jim Jarmusch's 1995 Western film that tells the story of William Blake (Johnny Depp), an accountant who goes on the run after murdering a man. Eventually, Blake finds a companion in Nobody, a Native American man who serves as a...

Released in 1992, Unforgiven continues to stand as the final statement Clint Eastwood has to say on the subject of the Old West. Eastwood’s direction guides this summing up of the Western genre which made him a star, and which he almost...

Focus (1945) is the first novel of Jewish-born author and playwright Arthur Miller; it focuses on racism, specifically antisemitism, or racism/prejudice towards people of Jewish descent. It follows Newman, a personnel manager for a large New York...

Gish Jen is an American novelist born on August 12, 1955 in Long Island, New York. Her mother and father were both born in China, so she grew up in a household that embraced Asian culture. As a teenager, her parents hoped she would pursue a...

My Year of Meats is a novel written by Ruth Ozeki and published in 1998. This is Ozeki’s first novel, and it tells of two women, separated by an ocean and by their respective cultures but connected by a Japanese TV cooking show being filmed in “...

Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer of the nineteenth century. He was born during 1860 in Russia and died during 1904 in Germany. Chekhov possessed rather simplistic yet commendable literary talent as his top plays and...

Rights of Man was a book that was written by Thomas Paine and published in 1791 and 1792. It was published in two sections separately, one in each of those years. Rights of Man contains 31 articles that center around the ideal that popular...

Published in 1958, Stride Toward Freedom is the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott told by the man at the forefront of its occurrence and whose involvement increased not on its impact, but also its meaning for the Civil Rights Movement. Martin...

Celeste Ng is a well-rounded novelist and short story writer known for her bestselling debut novel Everything I Never Told You, which was published during 2015 by Penguin Books. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was also published by...

The Samurai's Garden is the second novel by Gail Tsukiyama and widely considered her finest and most mature novel to date. Set against the historical reality of the Japanese invasion of China in the years leading to the outbreak of World War II,...

The Purple Cloud is often referred to as the 20th century’s first great science fiction novel. Published in the first year of the new century, the 1901 adventure from M. P. Shiel still retains its reputation as one of the superior examples of a...

Serving as the first female Makar - or National Poet of Scotland - from 2011 to 2016, Liz Lochhead's poetry is bold, adventurous and has a definite feminist streak that runs through it. Over the course of her successful career, she has adopted and...

Guantánamo Diary is the personal memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. He was born in Mauritania, a country in the northwest of Africa, in 1970. Arrested in 2001 by the U.S. military, he was suspected of having ties to al Qaeda, the terrorist...

Journals are commenced for a number of reasons. Sometimes they are begun as diaries which offer a psychological trail into self-reflection and a more intuitive level of self-awareness. Other journals offer the opportunity to write down immediate...

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was a prominent poet, renowned for his distinctive linguistic approach that blended elements of French literature, Greek mythology, drama, and English poetry. He was heavily influenced by the works of Wallace Stevens and...

An Irish poet and perhaps the most representative of the modernist poets, W.B. Yeats has offered much to the English literary canon. He is known not only for his contributions to British but also Irish literature and was an irreplaceable part of...

E. F. Benson was a British author who lived from 1867 to 1940. He may be most famous for his “Mapp and Lucia” series of novels as a result of the books having spawned two different and well-received BBC adaptations in 1985 and 2014. Benson was, in...

The Underdogs is a historical fiction novel written by the Mexican author Mariano Azuela. It was published in 1915 and is considered the classic novel of the Mexican Revolution. Azuela brilliantly reflects the events of the Mexican Revolution in a...